This year’s best coffee-table books transport readers across time and space, each of them pulling us out of our everyday lives and into distinct, thoughtfully crafted worlds. From brutalist buildings in Eastern Europe to private homes on the Amalfi Coast, architecture is the focus of several volumes. New York gets special attention with the Italian-American architect Rosario Candela’s penthouses—once home to Manhattan’s elite, including Jackie O, and transformative for the city’s skyline—and industrialist Henry Clay Frick’s mansion on the Upper East Side, now home to the Frick Collection. The most comprehensive study of Hokusai to date joins a monograph of David Hockney’s works on paper.
In photography, there are collections by Ernest Cole, Eve Arnold, George Hoyningen-Huene, Man Ray, Ruth Orkin, Garry Winogrand, and Annie Leibovitz. In film, 1,001 Movie Posters brings together the art for Casablanca, My Fair Lady, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Do the Right Thing, among countless others. In design, 18th Century Style revisits the timeless influences of France’s late Baroque period. Art and food intersect in The Gourmand’s Lemon, an elegant cookbook that pairs 60 lemon-inspired recipes with a history of the citrus.
And because we couldn’t settle on just one favorite, we have a tie for first place: The Package Holiday 1968–1985, a vibrant look back at the sun-soaked, party-filled vacations of the 60s, and Guy Bourdin for Charles Jourdan, a collection of radical, provocative advertisements shot by the photographer Guy Bourdin for the shoe brand Charles Jourdan from 1967 to 1983.
Jeanne Malle is an Associate Editor at AIR MAIL
